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Comment by gameswithgo | Hacker News Reader

>The secular world would benefit from adopting more formal definitions of their belief system.

Just as the religious world contains Christians, Jews, Scientologists, Muslims, Hindus, et cetc" with sometimes radically different ideas, the secular world too has a great many different people with different belief systems.

>If you believe you are not religious, it just means that you don’t have the cognitive tools to recognize the secular ideology that you have adopted

This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system". Given that axiom, you are right! I'm a fairly militant atheist but I have no problem accepting that I have a belief system, an imperfect one too. I just don't think there is a god.

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> This is just a sort of tautological argument, wherein you adopt that "to be religious" is the same as "to have a belief system".

Not OP, but I think this is a pretty narrow reading of their statement. Personally, I read it to be more about value and community dynamics.

Institutionalized religions often are very explicit about their (supposed) terminal values and arrange social situations to explicitly work toward or reinforce those values. I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

There is a difference between why we perform and action and the reasons we give for performing the same action [citation needed]. I think OP suggests that religions have structures useful for cognating about the former more sharply than secularism does.

> I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

I read it like that as well. I've seen this idea illustrated this way: a kid raised in a religious community gets drilled from an early age about morals as an umbrella abstraction (in the form of allegories from religious texts), so they don't need to be micromanaged about the moral implications of every individual scenario under the sun ("don't run in the supermarket!", "don't push your sister!", "don't yell in the hallway!", etc etc) because they are explicitly exposed to an underlying set of values to govern every scenario.

That's is an obviously religious leaning take (I heard it from a jewish person, though I'm not jewish myself), but I think there's a certain grain of truth in the sense that non-religious people don't have a standardized way of talking to kids about morals as an umbrella abstraction on a weekly basis, in a way that church goers do.

Plenty of people prove this not to be working at all.

Plenty of priests have fucked kids.

Religoius people are often enough the same amount of assholes or more. I have not fought over a city for ages due to some believe.

Religious types often say the same of the non-religious. Here's other analogies to illustrate the reductio ad absurdum: plenty of people prove school not to be working (by getting failing grades, passing by cheating, etc), plenty of people prove entrepreneurship not to be working (by going bankrupt), etc. All this line of observation shows us is that variability exists everywhere.

Something to keep in mind is that religious societies have existed for millennia, whereas societies that are openly non-religious are a relatively recent development, so comparing the two ought to account for a potential lack of historical hindsight on one of the sides.

Thats not my point i was making.

The parent mentioned specifically religious believes as a tool for good child upbringing.

My counter argument shows, that religious upbringing doesn't necessarily mean a good moral & ethics.

> The parent mentioned specifically religious believes as a tool for good child upbringing.

No, I merely pointed out that religious upbringing is explicit about some topics in ways that non-religious one usually aren't.

Your counter argument can be flipped around into "religious upbringing doesn't necessarily mean bad morals & ethics", so in effect it's not really saying anything meaningful.

You mention it though to bring it up as an argument or a point for religion otherwise you wouldn't do it.

Not everything must necessarily be a religion-vs-atheism competition (in fact it's tiresome that some people insist on putting every religion-related discussion in that light). I believe I was clear enough when I indicated that I'm open minded to ideas from religious groups, but I don't subscribe to their faith, so I don't understand the insinuation that I'd get brownie points or something for "shilling".

If you're seeing a factual argument exclusively as some sort of attack on your belief system, then you're missing the point that self-improvements efforts shouldn't be discriminating against an idea solely due to the source of insight.

In other words, if a statement is "you don't talk to your kids about morals as much as [insert religion] people do", it's petty to respond by saying "well the religious group you belong to has people that do poopy pants stuff" (even more so if some atheists also do said poopy pants stuff); it's more productive to instead say "huh, how then could I talk to my kids about morals more often?"

I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

You could say that secular groups may have implicit value systems, may even implicitly enforce but because they haven't made these values explicit, they allow to explicate, question and change them - whereas religion is about maintain an explicit and unchanging set of values.

So there's more to the not-explicitness of a secular process than "a religion that doesn't say it's a religion".

> I believe OP is pointing out that secular groups (at least those within view of OP's demographics) mostly fail to have explicitly defined value systems.

And there are good reasons for that. The currently dominating set of progressive views is inherently dynamic and based on the Overton moving in one direction. This is in direct opposition to religion where the basic set of values is normally fixex, often by a sacred book containing the words believed to be spoken by the founder or a deity.

Regardless of whether "everyone is religious," everyone certainly has revelatory beliefs, i.e. beliefs that were not reasoned to.

Christian thinkers have spilled a lot of ink attempting to clarify the boundary between reason and revelation whereas, in the secular world, many people do not seem to understand that many of their beliefs (particularly the foundational ones) are revealed.

You are confusing secularism with naturalism.

As a non-religious person, certainly I understand many of my beliefs come from convention or intuition or whatever non-rational source, sure.

But I don't have any meta-belief telling me to hold onto given beliefs-that-seem-implausible-or-unverifiable because I'll be rewarded in the end or because it's a test or whatever. I don't continually change whatever belief I know is arbitrary but that's because consistency has some utility so point remains.

Basically, I have no trouble with non-rational beliefs and behaviors. But religious specifically espouses irrationalist beliefs - irrationalism being the exhortation to keep, cultivate and fixate beliefs beyond the rational. Institutions other than religion, various flavors of Stalinism say, promote faith, fixating one's beliefs and so-forth. I'm against those too. But a wide variety of secular belief systems are against the irrationalist approach - some versions of liberal religion try to escape it too but as people observe, these folks are kind of becoming non-religious.

Edit: Just generally, "everything not-wholly-rational is a religion" is a slippery argument that's being way-abused in this thread.

Religion, spiritual beliefs, ghosts, lottery ticket "investing," superstitions, luck, horoscopes, phobias, ritual sacrifices, Capgras delusions/changelings, and faith healing are examples of what I categorize as magical thinking.

These are the ways of animals who cannot control their emotions long-enough to think clearly and honestly between banging on bones in front of a monolith.

If the average member of society is ever to progress beyond being a bunch of easily-misled rubes herded into tribal cult ideological pens, something needs to change where decent, intelligent people are lionized over minimally-useful celebrities and charlatans.

(The United States was founded by primarily anti-intellectual merchants and landowners who scoffed at the Old World's stodginess and intellectual pursuits.)

phobias

That's an odd thing to put in your list. Phobias aren't something people choose to believe in. They're specifically an irrational, subconscious pattern of behaviour. That isn't a belief.

It's only odd for people with external locus-of-control magical beliefs that things "just happen" to them. Phobias are irrational fears most people choose not to overcome. This is in contrast to people who aren't ruled by fear, and confront and overcome their fears. Therefore, a lack of agency argument would be moot. And, phobias aren't behaviors, they're dysfunctional, intrusive, reflex feelings related to particular triggers.

What is rational? Is not rationality subjective? What you might deem irrational others might deem perfectly rational, and vice-versa, what you might deem rational others might deem quite obviously irrational.

Are we to see experiences as rational explanation of a phenomena? Sure, I see and feel a rock, and I verify its existence rationally. I smell food and verify its existence rationally. What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?

No, we must disregard this as hallucination or a psychological problem. Only what we (and by we I mean the "educated western world") in our pre-determined frame of rationality deem rational can ever be rational, and all that falls outside must naturally be considered irrational irrespective of its potential rationality in relation to other experiences we might call rational.

Really (I think), something being rational is a state of mind, a common understanding with our peers. In a church most would agree that their belief is rational, not out of ignorance (though here you might disagree), but out of shared acceptance of a different frame of rationality, essentially accepting other experiences as being able to feed to rationality than those you might accept.

I guess the point I'm trying to make (and I might be way off) is that when you say that religiosity espouses irrationalist beliefs, they're irrational to you, within your frame of rationalism. To someone else you're the ignorant one who's fighting tooth and nail.

Edit: To those down voting I would love to engage further in conversation about this!

Rational means you'll make choices that benefit yourself. It's one of the core assumptions of game theory, economics, and policymaking. All the math breaks as soon as that's not the case because irrational is unpredictable. What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible so it's been known to rustle the jimmies of the first estate.

There are at least two forms of rationality – epistemic rationality (aka theoretical rationality), and instrumental rationality. Your comment doesn't clearly draw the distinction between them.

In the context of discussions about the rationality of religious belief, we are primarily talking about epistemic/theoretical rationality, although non-epistemic rationality does sometimes come up (for example, Pascal's wager).

Some people think epistemic rationality can be reduced to instrumental rationality, but the philosopher Thomas Kelly wrote what is (to me at least) a pretty convincing refutation of that viewpoint: https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/epistemicasinstrume...

I'm familiar with the rationalist movement and all the rationalists I've met have been wonderful people with few exceptions. I hadn't heard of epistemic rationality, but I find it interesting how the LessWrong definition (top search result) makes it sound like self-criticism and atonement.

One concern I have is how closely many people associate "rationality" with the "rationalist movement" (LessWrong, etc). Rationality has been discussed by philosophers for well over 2000 years. Aristotle famously declared that rationality was the feature that distinguished human beings from lesser animals. Most of those philosophers had radically different views from those of the contemporary "rationalist movement". Even today, many thinkers who radically disagree with the "rationalist movement" still believe in the importance of rationality, they just disagree with the "rationalist movement" on what actually counts as "rational".

Well now they get to be a footnote in Plato's Republic. I'm not concerned about what people believe. If they want to get excited about Bayes theorem then that's great. I'm not concerned if people disagree on what it's called or how it's defined. Do you think the people who get paid to be rational understand rationality? I've seen things like software that earned billions in additional revenue get rolled back because we couldn't explain how it made decisions. The answer is that I don't have the answers and no one else does too. What's remarkable is how philosophers like Charles Babbage helped us make thousands of years of philosophy executable and we've unleashed it unto the world. How do we begin to understand that let alone explain it to the world?

Do we want people to make choices that benefit themselves? That seems to be the root of so many problems in the world. Shouldn't we encourage people to make choices that benefit others, benefit the wider community, etc.?

No, we should encourage choices that maximize the benefit over all individuals including the person who is making the choice. The person making the choice is in no way morally less important than others.

We should also avoid thinking in terms of a false dichotomy. Most voluntary exchanges and relationships in the world are win-win-win, in that both counterparties are gaining and the externality is positive. In such a context, self-maximizing through profit seeking is the choice that maximizes the benefit to others.

What we want to discourage is a much more narrow cone of behavior. Corruption. Negative externalities. Things that aren't win-win-win.

Of course and one way to do that is by ensuring everyone gains. Startups for example create wealth by building products that provide a service to their communities. Paul Graham talks about this sort of thing on his blog. I think that's great even though it's not the case for folks in rent-seeking economies with zero-sum games where people can only win by making the other guy lose. Would you encourage someone in that situation to act against their self-interest?

> What's nice about rational agency is that it makes cooperation without hierarchy possible

And economic liberalism is the belief system that it works for the greater good.

> And economic liberalism is the belief system that it works for the greater good.

Perhaps also anarchism, due to its focus on having the minimum amount of hierarchy possible.

We actually don't know that:

"What about people experiencing a divine being communicating to them, then?"

But we have studied this and the answers tell us what the most realistic thing actually is and thats why we see 'divine being communicating to them' as a mental illness.

You can expierence this challanging thought yourself by taking LSD. Realizing that you are actually know everything for a few hours and than getting back to your 'normal reality' is exhausting.

But i still don't believe we are all caught on the earth and we need LSD to shackle those bounds. I know how many people are on the planet, how many people i have seen die and leave our planet in the normal rational way. I have never ever seen anything which makes me believe otherwise and LSD showed me even more how fragile my own reality is.

You might want to look in a medical book on different topics you refered to to see what you believe. Nonetheless its just more realistic that human a had a similiar brain issue than all other similiar independend cases before than that this person is now talking directly to god and we areound us are all dumb shits not being able to recognise it.

My default sentence for this is simple: I'm a good person, and i don't like the idea very much that there is a god who allows cancer in kids and rape from religious people and murder etc. and either this god is a massive asshole, clearly not relevant enought to woreshop or doesn't exist anyway.

I don’t know much of the field of rationality, yet I can’t help but think that you confirm my idea that rationality is subjective. You determine rationality based on probability, so essentially when you’re saying something is irrational, you mean it is improbable (or in your words realistic).

Taken further, is it not then irrational to think that the earth arose out of absolute nothingness, to become the perfectly aligned world we know? Is this realistic? Is this probable? (Not saying the alternative is necessarily more probable, just asking)

As to your default sentence you might want to look into the discipline of Harmatiology (the doctrine of sin), for you do not understand the commonly held view of Christians on this point.

I do connect rationality with math and chances.

Of course there is always an unkown right? We don't know it all.

But as i said somewhere else: math for example is universal, you can come up with the same rules independently were you are.

This doesn't happen with religion/believe.

There is no experiment in the world, which shows any universal truth to believing in one specific god or more specific gods or religion.

Nothing spiritual was proven ever in my lifetime. None.

So i dream. I like to come up with things, ideas, stories, places etc. but that doesn't motivate me to believe in it so hard that it affects my normal life.

Non religious people call this 'science'.

'We' think about the big bang 'we' wrote the book on it.

Religion writes books about 'gods' and repeat stories from the past.

Math unites people across the globe. Everyone agrees globally on the scientific truth.

I understand that there are plenty of countries which you would prefer not to life in but i do believe in my country but my country is a good one. We don't kill people anymore because they are different than the norm.

Picking up on the "is there a god" and who believes in it?

I have always wondered how many of the high priests or whatever their titles might be in any religion over the millenia (this includes Aztecs and Vikings etc) really just saw religion as another way of holding power (vs. kings or what have you). I.e. "just pretending" to believe and in reality just using it to to wield power and influence over people.

Please don't mistake this for saying there aren't very pious people in that group. I do not doubt there are. I just wonder. Just like there are politicians that truly try and improve things and help their constituents and then there are also the ones that really just enjoy having the power and that really couldn't care less until election time rolls around.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488136.

>I just don't think there is a god.

This would be agnostic (militant agnostic?), wouldn't it? I think a true atheist would say "I know that there is not a god."

Agnostics actually don't think the question of "is there a god?" is interesting or can have an answer

Not really.

There are "I know that there is not a god" atheists, those are the insufferable unholier-than-thou types like Richard Dawkins, who seem mostly interested in provoking religious people.

And there are "there is no falsifiable proof at all to support the existence of a god" atheists, which are the ordinary sensible ones, who don't hate religious people, they just don't share their beliefs.

Dawkins is actually a weak atheist (agnostic atheist), not a strong atheist. He thinks an interpersonal God is highly improbable, but it's not possible to prove a negative and so he doesn't assert that it doesn't exist.

> the secular world has many different people

agreed and the world would be more navigable if they adopted distinct names, garb & beliefs the way the other religions did.

If you think about it, every thanksgiving debate was really a religious debate among people who didn’t clarify their membership.

> agreed and the world would be more navigable if they adopted distinct names, garb & beliefs the way the other religions did.

Athiesm is to religion what not collecting stamps is to a hobby. We aren't the ones creating an imagined reality. We're just saying until there's substantive evidence to support the existence of a deity we probably shouldn't assume one exists.

You imply from your comparison that atheism is [not belonging to a group with a shared belief] and then say "we" [belong to a group with a shared belief], which is clearly self-contradictory. I strongly agree with the first part, but not with the second. There are certainly atheists who wouldn't agree with what "we" (you) are "just saying".

We, the people who aren't interested in unicorns, are rarely mentioned on lists of fantasy fandom although we do share the same feelings about a particular element of the fantasy genre.

I don't see why some see the need to clump people together by what they don't believe in. Atheism isn't about "interest" or "feelings", so your comparison doesn't hold either. Different people arrive at the same conclusions via completely different paths, many not even rationally. It's really arrogant to assume atheists are superior in this regard (and I'm not saying you said that but it's not too hard to infer), and I say that as an atheist myself.

> Athiesm is to religion what not collecting stamps is to a hobby.

I believe the point of the article and discussion is the particular atheists "collecting stamps" with more ideological ferver than the hobbyists.

> We aren't the ones creating an imagined reality.

One problem I see with this line of thinking is that it's often faux intellectualism, in the sense of not even attempting to define what a deity is in the first place, instead taking the lazy approach of "whatever you think god is doesn't exist". What exactly is a deity in the first place anyways? Bearded guy in the clouds? A lot of christians don't believe in that either. Jesus (i.e. a human)? A certain north korean leader that had similar godlike fame among followers most definitely existed (godhood claims notwithstanding). The holy spirit? Read "spirit" as you read "spirit of the law". Some flavors of pantheism actually argue that the concept of "an omnipotent omnipresent entity that nevertheless grants us free will" can be perfectly explained if said entity is the laws of physics.

As we can see, there's a pretty big spectrum ranging anywhere from strawmen to things that do exist. IMHO, proper atheism needs to be able to argue against the entire body of theism, not just narrow set of christian beliefs, and as such it's a belief system that doesn't fit many people. There's agnosticism (basically, "I don't know if god exists because the evidence doesn't convince me"), which is a much easier belief system to actually defend, and which I think describes more accurately the belief system that a lot of self-proclaimed atheists actually subscribe to.

The problem with that text book definition of Atheism, or Anti-Theist is that the the label of Atheist has taken an a life of its own, and the majority of people publicly proclaiming themselves to be an "Atheist" do not simply seek "evidence to support the existence of a deity", no instead they adopt the so called Atheism+ movement that incorporates loads of other philosophical and political positions into the label of "Atheist". It has become decidedly Authoritarian Left in its political positioning, so much so that many libertarians that used to proudly use the Atheist Label has stopped referring to themselves as Atheist

Atheism believes in many gods

No?

Atheism is actually polytheistic.

The Gods can be identified by answering these questions: “why am I here?”, “who am i?”, “what should I do?”, “what is true?”, “why should I suffer & die?”, “what will happen tomorrow?”, “who matters more: myself or others?”.

The deities of the secular religion would be “the self”, your parents, “the government/state and its figureheads“ , money (and the institutions controlling it), the earth / ecology/ the environment , “science”

These are deities because they are the object of irrational fear, worship, rituals & sacrifice.

To be clear, these gods are also worshiped by formally religious people (christians, muslims etc).

This is a standard argument most Christians make. It is not really true. You do not have to believe anything. You do not have to have answers.

Let me give you an analogy. Imagine growing up in a militaristic society, and the expectation is that you join the military and fight in whatever wars your imperialistic country engages in. Now suppose you do not feel like doing that. Then your community starts asking you, "but then, if you don't fight with us, then who will you fight for?". Do you feel in your life that you have to fight for one particular empire?

>You do not have to believe anything.

I think part of the confusion is there are multiple definitions of "atheist". One definition is someone who believes there is no god. That itself is a belief, so in that case your description doesn't match atheist. But another definition of atheist is someone who lacks a belief in god. So then your description would match atheist.

Also there are multiple definition of "agnostic" making the situation even more confusing.

I think dying for your own children might be the only exception

Atheism is actually a species of the gnostic heresy. Absolute certainty of the nonexistence of God is gnosis.

> Absolute certainty of the nonexistence of God is gnosis.

Absolute certainty of any spiritual truth is gnosis, but that of the nonexistence God is not one of the Gnostic heresies (which are specific heresies associated with the specific Gnostics, not a anything which happens to fit the definition of gnosiss.)

I think in order to convince yourself to give your life for something, you have to have a religious belief in what you are making the sacrifice for (greater good, community, progeny, greatness of your leader, virtue of your country – or for money if you are a mercenary). That would identify the god of your religion

In your analogy, by not fighting for the empire you are making choice, and arguably it’s to support the enemy.

But you’re missing the larger point he’s making and the point the article is making, many ppl who claim to be atheist do have a belief system, it’s simply ill-defined. Most atheists arguing in this thread will give answers and do think they know the truth (it’s that there is no god and life is a hedonistic pursuit). And those beliefs build on others and are built on by other beliefs/ideas as well.

You’re making the same argument many make when trying to build on wedge issues: take a tiny portion of a group that is in no way representative of the larger group and then make generalizations to prove your point.

Aside from you (I’m taking you at your word), I’ve yet to meet an atheist who really had no beliefs.

Atheism does not imply specific belief in any of those, only a lack of belief in God's with specific characteristics.

Just because I bathe myself in sheep's blood every time the Federal Reserve changes interest rates doesn't mean I think they are a god.

Infidel! Everyone knows you're supposed to perform ritual sacrifice at the next full moon, not bathe in sheep's blood.

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, but it's a little bit odd to me that a non-religious person would necessarily have an irrational fear of anything you mentioned. Where, in your world view, is there room for someone who can think critically and make rational decisions? Why must all of these totally reasonable things that make up our world be feared?

They can also be worshipped / loved.

There could be rational worship & love e.g. loving your parents because they care for you and they have direct impact over your wellbeing.

Irrational worship/ love is loving and icon or demagogue : extreme example being Kim Jong Il – when he is hurt or sad, everyone is heart broken.

Even in the free world we worship these demagogues. When trump is president many panic, some are elated. When the next president comes, the roles reverse some are relieved and some are sad.

A lot of those questions would be answered by "I don't know", and I don't know how that could be considered a god or similar to religious thinking. "I don't know" is a concept religions seek to avoid.

You seem to have some motivation to bring non-religious people away from their thinking, or looking down on them in some way, and making strange and spurious arguments in order to do so.

This could be useful as a metaphor, as an aid for some religious people to help them understand atheists and agnostics.

Imposing that metaphor as a truth when interacting with an atheist is not useful though. If anything, insisting on defining an atheist as religious shows an elementary lack of respect.

i found this insightful - that there are also the same set of 'gods' for both the religious and the athiest

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